ABSTRACT
This record, made in 1612 and preserved in the Minute Books of the Council of Stratfordupon-Avon, Warwickshire, provides a fascinating glimpse of corporate opinion about what was – and what was not – an appropriate use for a public building in a provincial town in early seventeenth-century England. Stratford-on-Avon was typical of many other provincial towns, where civic authorities wrestled to balance public appetite for plays and entertainment with concerns about the content and impact of public performances on civic audiences (Mulryne 2012, 175). But whilst such discussions clearly shed light on the wider issues of sectarian politics and religious controversies in early modern England, they also tell us something meaningful about the role of Stratford’s Guildhall as a ‘public building’: a locus for debate and discourse within and between members of the town’s governing elite.
